Best 120 quotes of Clayton Christensen on MyQuotes

Clayton Christensen

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    Clayton Christensen

    Almost always great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.

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    Clayton Christensen

    A lot has been written about the Internet bust. From my point of view, it's quite clear the Internet isn't a category; the Internet is a technological infrastructure that can be deployed to facilitate a disruptive business model or a sustaining business model.

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    Clayton Christensen

    And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. ... When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

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    Clayton Christensen

    An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Another thing I've observed is how critical the role of the CEO is when a technology truly is disruptive. In looking back on companies that have successfully launched independent disruptive business units, the CEO always had a foot in both camps. Never have they succeeded when they spin something off in order to get it off the CEO's agenda. The CEOs that did this had extraordinary personal self-confidence, and almost always they were the founders of the companies.

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    Clayton Christensen

    As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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    Clayton Christensen

    At the beginning of almost every industry, the available products and services are so expensive to own and complicated to use that only people with a lot of money and a lot of skill have access to them. A disruptive technology is an innovation that simplifies the product and makes it so affordable that a whole new population of people can now have one and use it at the beginning for simple applications, and then it improves to the point that it makes the old technology obsolete.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Because of the disruption phenomenon - technological progress outstripping the ability of customers to utilize it - the general tendency is for the money to migrate toward the subsystems.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve been passed by.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.

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    Clayton Christensen

    But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that.

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    Clayton Christensen

    By the time it becomes obvious that a technology will have truly disruptive impact, it is often too late to take action. This is one reason why we are such advocates of using theory to try to analyze industry change. Conclusive evidence that proves that a company needs to take action almost never exists. In fact, the data can fool management, lulling them into a false sense of security.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea, but everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Each of our children during their high school years went to 'early morning seminary' - scripture study classes that met in the home of a church member every school day morning from 6:30 until 7:15.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Every time you take someone figuratively by the hand and introduce him or her to Jesus Christ, you will feel how deeply our Savior loves you and loves the person whose hand is in yours.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Generally, the technology that enables disruption is developed in the companies that are the practitioners of the original technology. That's where the understanding of the technology first comes together. They usually can't commercialize the technology because they have to couple it with the business model innovation, and because they tend to try to take all of their technologies to market through their original business model, somebody else just picks up the technology and changes the world through the business model innovation.

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    Clayton Christensen

    Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

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    Clayton Christensen

    History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

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    Clayton Christensen

    How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

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    Clayton Christensen

    How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling.

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    Clayton Christensen

    I don't view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it's actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If a company truly wants to resolve the innovator's dilemma, it does need to be able to create wave after wave of disruptive innovation. And those disruptive innovations will typically grow to the point where they do cause some pain for leading companies. But most disruptive innovations create substantial new growth before they cause that pain.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If the theory accurately predicts what they [scientists] see, it confirms that it's a good theory. If they see something that the theory didn't lead them to believe, that's what Thomas Kuhn calls an anomaly. The anomaly requires a revised theory - and you just keep going through the cycle, making a better theory.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If you ask the average guy on the street to name five companies that have truly transformed themselves over the few decades, Hewlett-Packard would be on everybody's list. You'd also put on this list GE and Johnson & Johnson.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If you just look at the data, you are led to believe that things are getting better, rather than worse. That's why the fall is really precipitous, once you hit the ceiling.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

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    Clayton Christensen

    If you want to make better theory, you've got to use the best that's available and look through the lens of another discipline to see if you can uncover more anomalies. By looking at the phenomena of failure from the perspective of sales, marketing, finance, general management, and the equity markets, I was able to see things that Rebecca [Henderson] hadn't.

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    Clayton Christensen

    I have been blessed to see visions of eternity; and events in my future that have been important for me to foresee, have been revealed to me.

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    Clayton Christensen

    I have continued systematically to study the Book of Mormon and Bible to understand even more deeply what God expects of me and my family while on this earth.

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    Clayton Christensen

    I have healed the sick by the power of the God. I have spoken with the gift of tongues.

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    Clayton Christensen

    In 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy ... in the end I'm excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn't mind.

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    Clayton Christensen

    In a large successful company where your power base as CEO isn't all that secure, it's hard for a CEO to pursue a truly disruptive strategy.

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    Clayton Christensen

    In general, the questions that are on our mind are the same questions that have been driving our work over the past decade. How do we bring order to this messy, unpredictable world of innovation? How can we dramatically improve the chances of creating a successful new-growth business? How can we do this again and again? More specifically, it has become very clear that the fundamental paradigms of market segmentation and branding are badly broken - and we're working on developing more useful theories for these dimensions of innovation.